Writing Center Front Desk, Photo Credit: Columbia Spectator
The Columbia Writing Center, housed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, is a resource for students of all class years looking to find a supportive writing community on-campus—whether for a University Writing essay, an internship cover letter, a personal statement, or a senior thesis. This blog post will delve into resources for making (and making the most out of) a Writing Center appointment!
Making an appointment
When you log onto the Writing Center website and hit “make an appointment,” you’ll be asked to create a profile with information like your name, school, class year, declared or intended major(s), interests, and language background. You’ll then see a scheduling page, where you can book a session with any of the Writing Center consultants that have availability at a given day/time you’d like to come in, whether virtually or in-person. When booking a session, you’ll be prompted to give information about the project or projects you’d like to work on for the session—if they are for a class, you can supply additional information (such as class name, department, instructor), and if not, you can select from a broader range of categories for your project (such as personal statement, fellowship essay, cover letter, creative writing, etc). You can also indicate what stage your project(s) will be in, such as brainstorming, first draft, near-final draft, etc. This is by no means a binding commitment! Especially since appointments open days in advance, you might think a draft will be further along than it ends up being when you make the appointment—and that’s totally fine! The consultants will be happy to meet you wherever you’re at in the writing process.
How do I choose a consultant? Writing Center consultants are undergraduates, graduate students, and professional writers who all undergo pedagogical training at the start of the year and during their time at the Center. You can find consultant biographies here, which also indicates which language(s) consultants are comfortable speaking, and which areas they are more familiar with! Nonetheless, consultants often reflect that some of their most meaningful sessions came from writers who had a totally different background from theirs—especially when the task at hand was to clarify a specific argument/chain of reasoning and disentangle key claims from field-specific jargon.
What if all appointments are booked out? Writing Center appointments open up 5 days in advance between 12-2am ET, and the Center is closed during university holidays (eg. during Fall break, Spring break, Thanksgiving, and Winter Break). If you know in advance that you’d like to get an appointment, then it’s useful to book a few days ahead! All writers are limited to one appointment per week, to make sure there’s space for everyone. Additionally, if you’d really like to see a consultant and can’t find any available slots, you can also try coming to the Writing Center in-person (301 Philosophy Hall) for drop-in office hours. Some consultants are dedicatedly tasked with working with writers who drop-in during their shift, and others might be able to work with a drop-in if their writer can’t make it, so there’s a good chance of getting a consultation!
What kinds of projects can I bring? Any kind of writing project—personal, academic, professional, or otherwise! Many students’ first contact with the Center is workshopping an essay for a first-year Core class, like University Writing or Lit Hum, but sessions can also focus on a range of other topics, like revising a chapter of a senior thesis or a seminar paper, developing a fellowship personal statement, or organizing a creative writing project. In this sense, the Center can also be a tool for self-accountability: making an appointment a week in advance can be like setting an internal deadline for where you want your project to be by then, which can be especially helpful for longer or non-class related projects where there’s less built-in structure like theses, seminar papers, or applications.
Breakdown of the Consultation
Consultations are structured to be 40 minutes long, and can take place on Zoom or in-person in 301 Philosophy Hall—the modality is specified in the appointment confirmation! If you are coming to 301 Philosophy, you can sign in when you arrive, and your consultant will generally come to the front of the room to find you and get set up at a table.
The structure of the consultation itself can vary based on what you’d like to work on! Some writers come in with a single project, others with multiple; likewise, some come in hoping to bounce off ideas and brainstorm, while others want a fresh pair of eyes for a near-final draft. In this vein, your consultant will generally ask you what you’re working on and what your priorities are, and will structure the session around those to make the most of the 40 minutes.
The session might be spent on reading a draft or piece of writing you bring in to discuss it, reading exemplar essays (eg., for University Writing students, essays that have been published in The Morningside Review), going over feedback from an instructor on a given assignment/brainstorming ways to implement it, returning to a source-text to relate the original sources to you to bring in to discuss, among other possibilities. The consultant’s role is generally to help you develop whichever aspects of the writing process you wanted to focus on in that session, based on what you currently have and the parameters of what you are working on—rather than to ‘fix/correct’ a piece of writing.
Consultants will then usually end the session by discussing with you your next steps after the session, reflecting a broader focus on breaking down large and often intimidating writing projects into smaller, actionable steps! They will likely also take notes during the session to document your ideas and how you describe the arguments or structures you want to develop in a piece of writing, and can share these with you as a record to return to afterwards.
Session Reports
After your consultation, consultants will submit a report summarizing the topics you covered in the session, any notes they took, and what you identified as your next steps. These reports are sent directly to your email, and stored in your Writing Center profile for you to return to in future! Additionally, should you choose to (and if you are working on a project for a class), you can opt for this report to be sent directly to your instructor as well to share with them how you are using the Writing Center to develop your project for their class. This happens often in University Writing, where instructors might encourage students to go to the Center and keep them updated on how they are engaging with this resource! The choice to send a report to an instructor (for University Writing or otherwise), however, is ultimately yours, so you can always ask the consultant to send/not send based on what you are most comfortable with.
Recurring Appointments
As noted above, it can sometimes be tricky to get an appointment at the Center! In recognition of this, the Center offers weekly recurring appointments to certain groups of students who might need a stable source of support due to the kinds of writing projects they are working on or the extent of their previous exposure with academic writing in the context of a US university environment. Students eligible for recurring appointments include international students, FGLI students, students registered with disabilities, and senior thesis writers (among others!). If you are eligible and would like a recurring appointment, you can register for these at the start of the semester by filling out a brief form updated each term on the Writing Center homepage (this was the form for Fall 2023, for instance). If you are interested in and eligible for one of these appointments, the Center encourages registering early, as all spots can fill up to full capacity very quickly! An updated form is generally posted at the very beginning of the semester, giving you a chance to register as soon as the term starts.
Writing Productivity Sessions
Since community can sometimes be essential in advancing one’s writing, the Center also offers group sessions to help spark new ideas and focus on a given writing project! These include writing productivity sessions, hosted by consultants each week, which you can register for via the same portal as to book an individual session. In these productivity sessions, all members of a group of writers share what their goal is to accomplish in a given hour and take the time to work, with the consultant checking in at points to support everyone. The Center also offers workshops throughout the semester that are open to all students, and focus on specific aspects of the writing process!